Alaska’s Senators Assail Iran Deal

Sen. Dan Sullivan says the promised inspections aren’t serious and that the Obama administration gave up to too much in the negotiations.

“At a certain point concessions become humiliations!” he said Thursday on the Senate floor, after the procedural vote failed. “If they are too significant and too frequent, concessions are humiliations. No one likes to be humiliated.”

Sullivan says when he was in Alaska over the August recess, not a single constituent asked him to support the accord. The senator says veterans especially have a visceral opposition to the deal, a reaction he says lawmakers should heed. “People feel our concessions have gone so far, it’s as if we’re treating Iran as an equal, and Iran is not an equal to the United States of America.”

Murkowski says the agreement would allow Iran to rebuild its economy and stay on the path to a nuclear weapon. She favors continued sanctions instead.

“I absolutely reject out of hand the statement from our president that we have no choice, that it is either this deal or it is war,” she said. “That is a false choice, and I think it is wrong to put it that way before the American people.”